Christina Kline - The Exiles

Olive made a small noise. A whimper. “Please.”

“Please, sir .”

She opened her hands helplessly. “Please, sir.”

“ Kind sir.”

She was silent.

Evangeline, behind her in the skiff, leaned forward. “Olive. Just say it.”

The sandy-haired sailor looked at the other sailor and winked. Then he nudged Olive’s legs with his knee, pushing her closer to the water.

The men above them quieted. The only sound was the screeching of seagulls.

“Kind sir,” Olive whispered.

The sailor pulled the chain up, and with it, Olive’s body, so that she hung suspended over the water. He seemed poised to let go. Without thinking, Evangeline cried out and stood up. The skiff rocked wildly side to side. “Fer Chrissake, wench, will ye go overboard too?” the sailor behind her said, pushing her roughly on the shoulder so that she fell hard on the wooden bench.

The sandy-haired sailor yanked the chain back toward him, and Olive collapsed on the platform in a heap. For a few moments she lay at the base of the ramp. Her wrists were scored with blood. Her back heaved oddly up and down, and at first Evangeline thought she was laughing. Then she saw that Olive’s eyes were squeezed shut. Her body was shaking, but she didn’t make a sound.

After the four prisoners had been transferred to the ship, they stood on the main deck, waiting to be unshackled. A shirtless sailor with a scaly green-and-black dragon inked across his torso held up a ring of keys. Except for Cecil, in the shadowy light of a bedroom with the drapes closed, Evangeline had never seen a man without his shirt, not even her father in his dying days. “You.” The sailor gestured to Evangeline, motioning for her to sit on an overturned bucket.

A small crowd of sailors had formed. She’d never seen men like this, with faces leathery and as creased as walnut shells, hawklike eyes, sinewy arms covered in elaborate tattoos. The guards at Newgate had been contemptuous, but they didn’t lick their lips in lascivious revelry, making obscene noises with their tongues.

The locksmith instructed another sailor to hold the chain between Evangeline’s manacles, then he knelt down and opened the irons around her ankles before unfastening the ones around her wrists. When her shackles fell to the ground, the men around her yelled and clapped. Evangeline shook out her sore hands.

The locksmith jerked his head toward the others. “They’ll settle down. It’s always like this with a new group.”

Evangeline looked around. “Where are the other prisoners?”

“Most of ’em are down there.” He raised his chin toward a dark, square opening from which a handrail jutted out. “In the bowels. The orlop deck.”

The bowels. Evangeline shuddered. “Are they—caged?”

“No shackles on board. Unless ye do something to deserve it.”

It surprised her that prisoners were allowed to move freely, but then she realized, of course. Unless they chose to leap into the water, there was nowhere to go.

She couldn’t swim. But for a brief, wild moment, she considered leaping.

“Name is Mickey,” a midshipman told the women after the last of them was released from her chains. “I won’t remember yours, so don’t bother telling me. The ship’ll be docked in the harbor another week or two, until they reach the quota. Quarters are tight and getting tighter. You’ll take sponge baths—clothes on, mind ye—on the main deck once a week, to keep it bearable on the orlop deck.”

He doled out coarse yellow sponges, bricks of lye soap, wooden spoons and bowls, tin cups, and gray burlap shifts, and showed the women how to roll everything into horsehair blankets.

Pointing at a pile of bedticks, he said, “Each of ye, grab one of those.”

The bedticks were heavy. Evangeline smelled hers: it was mildewed, filled with wet straw. But at least it would be better than the hard stone floor at Newgate.

Gesturing at the women’s feet, Mickey said, “When it’s not freezin’ ye should go barefoot on the main deck. It can be rough at sea. Ye wouldn’t want to pitch over.”

“Does that happen?” one of the women asked.

He shrugged. “It happens.”

Motioning for them to follow, he disappeared down the rope ladder. “Ye’ll get the hang of it,” he called from below as they crept down the ladder with their unwieldy bundles and bedticks. Pointing out the officers’ quarters, he led them down the narrow hall to the lip of another opening. He dug a candle stub out of his pocket and lit it. “Hades, this way.”

Struggling to balance their bulky loads, the women followed him down an even flimsier ladder into a low, cave-like space, weakly lit by swinging candle lamps. As soon as Evangeline reached the bottom rung, she dropped her bedtick on the floor and covered her nose with her hand. Human waste and—what could it be? A rotting animal? How quickly she’d recovered from the stench of Newgate and acclimated to fresh air.

Mickey gave her a lopsided grin. “Orlop’s just above the bilge. A stew of filthy water. Fragrant, in’it? Add to that the chamber pots and stinky candles and god knows what else.” Pointing at her bedtick he added, “I wouldn’t set that on the floor if I was ye.”

She snatched it up.

Gesturing toward the narrow sleeping bunks, he said, “There’ll be close to two hundred women and children down here at night. Cozy quarters. I advise ye to keep your soap and bowl under your mattress. And hide anything ye care about.”

Olive claimed an empty top berth. “Need me privacy.” She heaved herself up, grunting.

Evangeline dumped her bedtick onto the berth below Olive’s and unrolled her blanket. The space was half a yard high and half a yard wide. No room to sit up and not long enough to stretch out. But it was hers. After unpacking her things, she took Cecil’s handkerchief, smoothed it out on the blanket, refolded it with the crest and initials hidden, and pushed it deep under the mattress behind her tin cup and wooden spoon.

“The captain steers the ship, but the surgeon runs it.” Mickey pointed toward the rafters. “He’s your next stop. Can any of ye read?”

“I can,” Evangeline said.

“Ye first, then. Dr. Dunne. On the tween deck. Name on the door.”

She made her way to the ladder and clung to it tightly as it swayed from side to side. In the narrow hallway she knocked on the door with the brass plate. From behind the door she heard a curt: “Yes?”

“I was told to . . . I’m a-a convict.” She blanched. It was the first time she’d identified herself that way.

“Come in.”

Cautiously she turned the knob and entered a small oak-paneled room. A man with short dark hair sat at a mahogany desk facing the door, flanked by bookcases, with another door behind him. He looked up with an air of distraction. He was younger than she expected—perhaps in his late twenties—and was dressed formally in a double-breasted navy uniform braided in gold and lined with brass buttons.

Beckoning with his hand, he said, “Close the door behind you. Name?”

“Evangeline Stokes.”

He ran his finger down the page of the ledger in front of him and tapped it. “Fourteen years.”

She nodded.

“Attempted murder, larceny. . . . These are serious charges, Miss Stokes.”

“I know.” She looked at the surgeon’s crisp white collar and gray-green eyes. The silver monogrammed cup and round glass paperweight on the desk. The Shakespeare volumes lined up neatly on a shelf in the bookcase behind him. This was a man she might’ve been acquainted with in her previous life.

He pursed his lips. Shutting the ledger, he said, “Let’s get started, shall we?”

Opening the door behind his desk, he ushered her into a smaller room with a raised bed in the middle. She stood against the wall while he measured her height and around her waist with a cloth tape, checked her eyes, and asked her to stick out her tongue while he peered into her mouth. “Reach toward the ceiling. Now arms straight ahead. Good. Try to touch your toes.” Feeling around her midsection, over her apron, he molded his hand around the bump as if palming a grapefruit. “Six months, give or take. This child will almost certainly be born in my care.”